


if you open my chest, see that two hearts are beating

by violetinfidel



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords
Genre: Ancestral Memory, Chosen Hero, Prophetic Dreams, Reincarnation, Sort Of, even tho ive been on this site for a while, honestly dont know how to tag things, i dunno, reverse-prophetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 17:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16580672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetinfidel/pseuds/violetinfidel
Summary: "Why did it have to be him? Out of everyone, everyone in Hyrule, why him?"





	if you open my chest, see that two hearts are beating

**Author's Note:**

> requested by an anon on tumblr from an ask- looking back through asks for inspiration, i stumbled across it again, and decided i wanted to write it (mostly as an excuse to write valensuela and artura)

 

He’s had this dream before.

It isn’t the exact same thing, it never is, but it’s close enough that he can recognize what’s going on before anything really happens. There’s always a story to the dreams he gets (sometimes they’re nightmares) but they don’t come in order, they come broken in little chunks all scrambled and shoved out of order, like someone dropped the loose pages of a manuscript and just swept them all together without bothering to look at the page numbers. 

This night it’s the weird bird dream- that’s what he’s come to call it. He’s had… some bad nights from this one in particular. Falling from the sky, relying only on a careworn hand-stitched sail to save him from hitting the ground at terminal velocity, so so many lonely nights spent camping out on a quiet forest floor, out of his element and scared stiff and still with a vital mission to carry out. Monsters many times larger than he is, ones even the legends of the sky-world could never have warned him about, and a demon lord bent on getting him out of the picture, with the ability to kill him in an instant yet always insisting upon toying with him.

(The person in the dream whose eyes he looks through is not him, but it is  _ him _ . He is too young to understand the gravity of this.)

It seems pleasant enough tonight. He’s up in the sky-world- they call it Skyloft, or at least this particular island- and he’s leisurely wandering the halls of the sky knights’ training academy, a small, cozy little thing filled with people he knows and trusts and people he doesn’t. 

It’s late, later than he normally stays up, but he can’t seem to sleep. He’s restless and itching to  _ do _ something; maybe he’d go train with the sword he’s only recently been permitted to practice with, but he’s sure the sparring hall is closed now. He might try to swim, or garden, but it’s so dark out, and he has no doubt that the night patrol will chastise him for endangering himself, and even if that doesn’t happen he’s sure to get a bite or two from a remlit. 

Quietly, he opens the heavy wood door and goes outside. Maybe the fresh crisp air will clear his mind.

He walks, without thinking, tries to enjoy the cool night breeze and just lets his feet go. He walks for only a few minutes later and finds himself at one of the many jumping platforms scattered along the edge of Skyloft. He goes to them often, to fly: he knows that soon enough his bond and his skills with his loftwing will be of paramount importance, that if he begins to fall behind then he’ll almost certainly never become a knight like he’s always wanted to be. (There’s nothing else to  _ do _ here.)

He knows that he isn’t technically supposed to be out flying at night, not when it’s so dark and the wind patterns can be so unpredictable, but… 

He looks around, makes sure no one is watching, jogs back a few yards and takes a running leap off the edge. He whistles, a simple three-note tune he’d trained the loftwing to respond to, and she comes quickly, a soft feathered dart below him, her bright red feathers dulled to a muted purple in the darkness. With practiced ease she catches him, whisks him upward with five sharp beats of her wings, rides an updraft until they’re a safe distance above patrol height. The air is so thin this high, sharp and cold and stinging as she glides, and he pulls his scarf closer to his face and presses closer to her.

Even though the wind lashes at his face and he’s starting to lose feeling in his cheeks, he loves it up here. He’s so much freer in the air with his loftwing, and it’s a distraction from the tedium of his life on Skyloft. He loves his home, and he loves the people he shares it with (and he loves the food especially) but everything is the  _ same _ there. The island is so small, and it’s still the largest they know of, and daily life is always a never-ending never-changing checklist. Wake up, eat, train, help tend to the gardens, help with tasks around the academy, practice flying for the ceremony, eat again, a few hours of free time (always the same) and go to sleep.

In the sky, at least, there are newer things happening, new weather patterns and cloud formations and somehow, new octoroks. He flies often- too often, many of his instructors tell him- and he always goes searching, trying to find something else, something interesting, something worthy of his attention, but he always comes back restless and unsatisfied. 

He flies for an hour at least, a leisurely tour of the many scattered islands nearest Skyloft, and after a particularly close brush with a patrolman he finally decides that it’s time to go back to his quarters before he gets caught and put on probation again. He dismounts on a tiny barely-used platform on the underside of Skyloft, gives his loftwing one final affectionate scratch on her chest, and foots it back to the Academy, ducking his head as he walks and trying to act like someone just going for a late-night stroll. 

It works, or at least the handful of guards don’t say anything to him as he passes by, and he gets back to his quarters with no problem. He strips to his underclothes and lays down and tries to sleep despite the weird, foreboding feeling in his gut.

Link wakes with the strange, gnawing ache of homesickness in his stomach. 

Which is weird, because he’s home, of course, sound in his bed in Hyrule Castle, tucked under his four blankets against the chill of late autumn.

He gets up with only a little reluctance, wraps himself in a blanket (the nice soft blue one) and goes in search of his father. It’s still very early in the morning, and technically neither of them have to be awake for another hour or so, but he knows that he’ll be awake- he always is, this early, to get things ready for the day since he gets so busy later.

Link’s sure he’ll be busy now but that doesn’t really matter; even the captain of the guard can spare some time for his son, and anyway he’s just had another exciting and interesting dream, and his father asked him specially to tell him about those interesting dreams. He isn’t sure why exactly, he didn’t give him a reason, but he’s sure it’s because his father finds them as fascinating as he does. He’s proud of his own imagination sometimes, after the especially vivid ones, and he can tell that all the dreams he’s shared are just as enthralling to everyone he tells them to.

His father is in the mess hall, sitting alone at a long table with a plate of breakfast he no doubt made himself- Link recognizes the particular mix of foods on the plate that none of the castle cooks have the time to make en masse- and Link decides to play the spy, wrapping himself in his blanket and sneaking around and under tables until he’s just behind his father, laying underneath one of the low wooden benches. He stifles a giggle into the blanket and eases out from under the bench and slips under his father’s table, quiet and unseen like the sheikah he’s read about in all the history books.

His father still sits unaware there, almost certainly revising his patrol schedule for the knights-in-training, and Link couldn’t be more delighted: here he is, only nine and fooling the most capable knight in the entire world!

He brushes the edge of the blanket against his father’s leg and his father starts, shaking the table. 

“What is that?” His father asks, voice practically booming in the empty hall, and Link snickers into his arm.

“Something is under this table,” He says when Link brushes against his ankle. “Did one of the stockroom cats get in here? Or perhaps one of the yard dogs?”

Link holds in his laughter and pokes him on the side of the leg as hard as he can and darts away when his father reaches underneath to grab him.

“This cat is a very brave one,” He says, “But it still needs to go back into the stockroom. If I can just find it so I can catch it-”

Link pops out from under the table then, blanket wrapped about him like a cloak, grinning from ear to ear. 

“It was me!” He announces gleefully, and giggles when his father’s jaw drops in shock (feigned, of course, but he doesn’t know that, caught up in the joy of the moment). “There aren’t any cats in here, silly!”

“I  _ thought  _ it seemed too big for an animal,” His father says, and sweeps him into a hug so tight it crushes the air from his lungs. He pats the bench beside him and pushes aside the papers there and slides over a little plate. “I thought you might be up, so I made you a plate.”

Link all but inhales it, shoveling it in his mouth with all the ravenous speed of a young boy, and drains half his father’s glass of orange juice before he can do anything about it. 

“You can have the rest of mine,” He offers, when Link very obviously eyes what’s left on the larger plate, and who is he to refuse? So he has the rest of that as well, and finishes off the juice for good measure, and then sits contentedly against his father, kicking his legs. “May I ask what it is that has you up so early this morning? Today was your day to sleep in, you know.”

Of course, the dream- he’d almost forgotten why he’d come in the first place.

“I had a dream again,” He tells his father.

“Well, that’s nothing new, everyone dreams,” His father says, humor in his tone but something solemn in his eyes, something that Link doesn’t understand. “What was it this time?”

“It was the weird bird dream again!”

“The one with the big sky?”

“And the big pumpkins!”

His father carefully lays down the papers in a neat pile and smooths them down and turns his full attention to Link. “What happened?”

“It wasn’t so much this time,” He says. “Not like the other ones with the crazy monsters or the diamond guy. I think… I think it was early in the story. I didn’t feel rushed or sad or anything. I didn’t even have the sword with the blue lady.”

“Was the island in it? The floating one?”

He nods vigorously. “That was really all there was. I was on it and it was really late but I couldn’t sleep, which is funny ‘cause I was always so tired in all the other bird dreams. So I went outside, I left that training house, and I walked for a little and just ended up flying instead.”

“By yourself? How?”

“My loftwing!”

His father’s stare is blank.

“A big ol’ bird,” He says enthusiastically. “Huge! Bigger than a horse! And she was mine!”

“Loftwing,” His father says, almost reverently, trying the word. “What did she look like?”

“She had a big beak, a long one hooked on the end like a… you know those birds with the long necks and the fat face? The one that wouldn’t get off the training yard that one time?”

“The shoebill?”

“Yeah! She was kind of like that, only  _ way  _ bigger and with a shorter neck, and she looked purple in the dark but I know she was actually red, super bright like a rose. I flew on her,” He says sagely, and his father nods. “Not very much happened. I was there for a long time and it was cold so high up and then I went back to my room.” He pauses for a moment. “I felt sort of weird at the end, though. When I woke up I still felt kind of weird. In the dream I was going to bed and something just felt… wrong. I think that was probably just… um…”

“Foreshadowing?”

“Yeah, that. And then I woke up for real and I- well, I know it’s silly, ‘cause I  _ am _ home, but I felt kind of homesick. But I’m better now!” He adds when a strange look crosses his father’s face. “It was probably just my empty stomach!”

His father doesn’t speak for a long moment. “It’s good that it wasn’t a bad dream this time,” He says, finally, and Link nods. The nightmares are the worst ever. He swears he can really feel the injuries he gets in the dreams even after he’s woken up.

“It was nice, really! It was cool to fly!”

“I wonder what that feels like,” His father agrees. “Certainly no one else can say.”

He wants to stay and talk some more, but he’s starting to feel tired from the full stomach and even with the blanket it’s cold, so he says goodbye to his father for the morning and goes back to bed to huddle under his blankets until the sun warms the day a little more.

His father watches him go, disconsolate.

 

Once he’s sure that Link’s tucked back in bed for the remainder of the morning, the captain goes to find Valensuela and Artura. He’s sure that the latter is awake now and the former ought to be as well- and true to his prediction, he finds Valensuela arranging one of the training yards, and he catches Artura on his way to his room from his patrol shift.

He feels bad for stopping Artura- he knows how exhausted he is already, doesn’t want to keep him from his sleep- but it’s important, something he’s only entrusted to these two people so far, and he’s losing his sense of certainty about how to deal with the situation.

“I won’t take long,” He says again as they enter the room- just a little out-of-the-way place off a small service hallway, somewhere they aren’t likely to be overheard unless someone is actively seeking them, and if that’s the case they have different problems entirely.

“Don’t worry about it. I know you wouldn’t take my sleep away from me for something trivial.” Again with the humor disguising solemnity. It’s becoming a common theme. 

“It’s about Link,” Valensuela says. It isn’t a question. The captain isn’t surprised that he’s guessed it so easily; Valensuela is one of his finest for a reason.

He shuts the door, sits down in the chair opposite them, sighs. “He says he had another one of those dreams.”

“They seem to be getting more frequent.”

“Was it a bad one this time?”

“He says it wasn’t. It didn’t seem particularly… I don’t want to call it unimportant, but compared to the others he’s had, it just seemed…”

“Irrelevant?”

“Maybe. This one sounded almost normal. Like maybe they don’t mean anything after all.”

“ _ Almost _ normal?” Valensuela’s tone is a little patronizing, but the captain is too distraught to pay attention to that.

“It was something at the end that he said. That he woke up feeling homesick. And the dream was about that island.”

It’s quiet for a long minute. Neither of them seem to know what to say and he isn’t sure what to think (he  _ knows _ , in his heart, but it’s something he’s fighting against tooth and nail).

“He reads a lot of those history books in the library,” He says, finally, almost desperately. “Likes to think of himself as the hero in all the training yard games.”

Artura shakes his head. “You know what I’m going to say. What anyone would say.”

“I don’t think any of us want to accept it,” Valensuela adds, gently. “But denying it won’t make it any easier. It won’t help any of us and if anything it’s going to hurt him. He is what he is.”

“But are we sure of it? Do we have enough proof to say that for certain?”

Valensuela shrugs almost noncommittally. “Maybe we don’t. The evidence is circumstantial at best, but this isn’t a court of law, and we all agree on it, however reluctantly. There are a lot of things we’ve been wrong about in the past, but I don’t think this will be one of them.”

“It’s just…”

“Too many things line up,” Artura says. “Too many. There are things he knows that he has no business knowing- no  _ way _ of knowing. Only our top scholars have so much detail on the past heroes’ lives and even their knowledge is spotty, but it falls right in with all these things Link is telling you.”

“So maybe he asked one of them, you know he’s always curious-”

“Captain.” Artura, too, speaks gently. “It isn’t just the dreams. You know that. You’ve remarked on it yourself before.”

“It’s possible that it’s only coincidence.” He says this angrily but without any real heat.

“The chances of that are slim to none. We’re just being realistic.”

“So it’s realistic to assume just based off this… this speculation that Link is the hero?  _ The _ hero?”

Valensuela and Artura share a look. 

Artura sighs. “Most of all we just don’t want you to let yourself be blindsided.”

“There are two outcomes, really, provided we take this seriously. Either we’re right and at least he’s prepared, as much as he can be, or we’re wrong and that’s a weight off our shoulders and no one is worse off for it.”

“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, isn’t that what you tell all the kids you train? That’s all we can do, Captain.”

He sighs again. He knows they’re right and he hates them for it. Hates all of this. “Say we’re right,” He says finally, tiredly, “This has implications beyond him, you know.”

“Of course it does. And we’ll prepare for those as well, as best we can.”

“All we can do is our best, Captain, and knowing you I’m sure it will be no small contribution. We’ll try to anticipate as much as possible. The rest is out of our hands.”

He sighs again- this is so tiring, so draining, and it isn’t even really  _ his _ problem- and he buries his head in his hands. “Why did it have to be him? Out of everyone, every person in Hyrule, why  _ him _ ?”

“Selfish of you,” Artura says, tone playful, and even so the captain feels his hand on his shoulder. “If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. We can be grateful for the fact that he’s well brought up. He’s been training since he was old enough to hold a stick and he’s the son of a captain and he’s surrounded by people who can help. His circumstances couldn’t be better.” A pause. “I know that isn’t the kind of reassurance you’re looking for, but ultimately it’s for the best. I don’t like it either, Captain. None of us do. Don’t mistake my confidence in the boy for any kind of happiness about it.”

Valensuela brings his chair closer. “We’ll help him, Captain. You know that too. Regardless of what happens, he won’t walk alone.”

He lets them go, then- Valensuela back to his duties for the day and Artura to (hopefully) bed. He spends the majority of the morning agonizing over what to  _ do _ and when Link gets up for the day and comes to find him he puts his bitterness aside and just tries to enjoy their time together. They’re going to have to get more serious soon, to prepare him for what may or may not be coming, but he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to ruin Link’s childhood. He only gets one, and, if the legends of the hero all say true, he won’t even get all of it intact. He’s caught between the mutually exclusive responsibilities of letting Link be a kid and raising Link to be what he’s destined to be. 

Link drags him by the wrist to the sparring yard- wants to play at heroes, he says, wants to fight off those big bad monsters- and something sharp and aching and sick twists his heart, but what can he do except say yes? How does he explain to Link, a boy of only nine, still struggling with his vocabulary and not yet old enough to get a snack without asking permission, that the dog days are over?

So they play at heroes, and he watches as Link stabs a fake sandbag octorok and crows his victory and he tries not to let his misery show.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
